For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility,by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace,and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility.

In “Hostipitalité” (the English version can be found here), Jacques Derrida plays on the tangled roots of the words ‘hospitality’ and ‘hostility’. I won’t pretend to track with all the intricacies of his dissection of Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace, but what I found most interesting is the notion that hostility is always present in hospitality.

Where a host welcomes a guest, the host invariably has authority and sets, at least implicitly, the terms and boundaries by and within which hospitality can be enjoyed. For this reason, the invitation to make oneself at home is impossible as a guest of a host. If a guest were truly at home, she would be free to set the terms and boundaries herself.

In the English-speaking corners of contemporary Christendom, cutting across Evangelicalism, Catholicism, and conservative and mainline Protestantism, the modifier ‘radical’ gets applied, gets misapplied, and in many cases serves only to make things sound edgy. “Radical hospitality” pops up in various corners – Catholic authors wrote a book about it based on a section of the Rule of Benedict where monks are called to receive guests as if they are Christ; there are fiery lefty sermons about it. In these contexts, it can be about quiet, self-sacrificing love of the other or about extravagantly loving one’s neighbor, or fighting tirelessly for the wellbeing of the stranger.

From my purposes, I want to use ‘radical’ as what’s inherent or essential (in the generic sense) about something: at the root of hospitality are a couple of tricky etymons, hospes (guest) and hostis (enemy, stranger). Present in all the words they begat and that their begotten begat is this tension that Derrida was getting at. A host can welcome and shelter, a host can be the victim of a parasite, a host can be Christ sacrificed and represented in the Eucharist, a host can be a multitude of hostile forces or heavenly ones. In hotels, hostels, hospitals, and hospices people depend on and are vulnerable to other people.

The picture of hospitality and hostility (hostipitality) that emerges from this family of words is one of relationships within power structures. I started writing this post months ago in response to my frustration with how I and the communities I belong to and the layers of government that represent me respond to inequality, injustice, and crisis. With everything going on in Ferguson, Missouri and in West Africa and the other unnamed miscarriages of justice and failures to act in my city and in my own neighborhood, I feel now more than ever the seeming paradox that I must do something, but cannot do anything.

I think that that paralysis is predicated on a hospitality model of engagement with injustice, one where people with power (to include the kind of power we hold as members of a group) reinforce and belong to a system that benefits us and say to those who are suffering from injustice, inequality “come into my home, into my system where I am comfortable, where I set the rules, the terms of engagement and we will examine and address your issues”. We as Christians, or we as white people or we as men or we as any other identity that depends on a system or structure in place that privileges almost always fail to leave our ‘homes’ to deal with issues that disproportionately impact others. Even when we travel abroad as humanitarians and missionaries to live among people we so desperately want to help, we often bring our own systems and structures with us and try to build foundations for them on the backs of those they may already be oppressing.

What if Ephesians read differently, “His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace,and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hospitality“?

I do not take the implications of this lightly because, like so many other people, I want the moral satisfaction of solving other people’s problems at no cost to myself. What if not expecting people who are victims of injustice and oppression to play by my house rules is messy? What if, God forbid, I am somehow wronged in the process of their search to set things right for themselves?

And I don’t know what exactly the most effective way to get out of my ‘house’ is yet. I know that feeling sorry for myself that I’m not transforming the world by retweeting new stories isn’t going to cut it, but I also know that there’s this feeling of being too busy that serves as an excuse. “If only we had more time, more resources, but alas.” And listening is a start, but listening to, say, a person of color on an NPR story isn’t listening. I’m not sure I know what to do to listen properly.

Maybe one small pickaxe I can take up to chip away at things is to confront my expectation for a politics of niceness that is inherent in this hospitality dynamic. These expectations can often lead people to say things like, “well, if all those black people in Ferguson would just behave like model citizens in expressing their anger over a member of their community being murdered, we could have a civil conversation about it and maybe find some reconciliation” are especially egregious. It’s almost like going out and murdering someone and then inviting their bereaved family members and friends into your home for tea expecting a quiet conversation. ‘National conversations’ and dialogues are fine starting points, but unless they lead to action, to substantive changes in the dynamics of the systems that produced the tragedies and injustices begotten by them, then they are more than worthless, they are perpetuating injustice by being a ruse where we confused acknowledging that someone has something to say, but limiting it, restraining it, and removing its capacity to change anything.

So in sum, I don’t have the solution. I’m looking for the courage to be less hospitable, to get out of my house. My prayer would be that our hospitality would be put to death in order to create a new humanity, a humanity that doesn’t wound under the guise of us listening to and caring for each other.

A lot’s been made of whether or not being gay is a choice. Whatever the precise ratio of heritable to environmental factors leading to our physically attraction to some people and not others, it’s safe to say that few spend their pre-pubescent years consciously cultivating proclivities and predilections. Because we are social beings bound up in the contingency of our relationships to one another, biological creatures regulated by neurochemicals, participants in particular political and economic systems constrained by our access to power and capital, and a million other these-kinds-of-beings in those-kinds-of-structures, any facile treatment of choice should be met with suspicion, especially when it comes to a freighted issue like human sexuality.

I think a sufficient number of philosophers, academics, pop psychologists, neurobiologists, and internet pontificators have undertaken analyses of the nature of free will and choice, so that’s not really where I’m headed here. For my purposes, same-sex attraction isn’t a choice, but what people choose to do with their same-sex attraction is.

I’ve gone from talking about being gay to same-sex attraction and those shouldn’t be confused. Gayness implies something more active than attraction—a performance, an identity. Often, traits or behaviors that have only the most tenuous connection to sexual attraction are called out as gay. Same-sex attraction is heaped in with a host of other gender non-conforming traits or behaviors, usually expected to occur together. This understanding leads to statements like “but you don’t seem gay”. Whether this is right or wrong or founded in logic, let’s recognize that an ostensibly narrow question about sexual attraction and sexual activity is bound up in much broader understandings and judgments about gender performance.

And, similarly to sexual attraction, the things we do that make up our gender identity are mostly light years from being freely chosen. Sure, we can consciously cultivate a habit or mimic a normative or transgressive way of performing an identity, but most of what constitutes our gender is the results of all kinds of things we’re not thinking about and may never have thought about.

So what can we choose, exactly? What conscious choices (even if those too are mired in murk of the unconscious and subconscious and the preconscious) are available to us? Well, a lot of people advocate for a politics of identity. Naming ourselves, claiming a group, organizing and acting on these identities. I think it’s great to start there, or at least near there: finding the things about ourselves that allow us to relate to other people. Sometimes these commonalities will be a means for coming together and celebrating and sometimes these shared characteristics will be what we’re attacked by others for and will be a rallying point where we can unite and support each other in the face of adversity, and, sometimes, it’ll be all of the above.

I don’t think we should stop there, though. I think if we view what we have in common too narrowly, we get bogged down in parochial ways of seeing ourselves. And so that’s why we must continue to choose not a static identity, but a posture of openness. In the arena of sexual identity politics, ‘queer’ seems to be the closest thing to expressing this. I think being queer is a choice that we should all make. And I don’t mean queer in the simply in the sense of some kind of norm-transgressing sexual identity (but we should question norms and be aware of the way they operate to limit us be they straight norms or gay norms or what-have-you norms).

I mean queer more like I understand Judith Butler might mean it: choosing to look at the ways we (any we) have been marginalized and choosing solidarity with others who’ve been marginalized in similar and different ways. Not forgetting the pain of others in our own pain. This demand weighs the most heavily on marginalized people who have privilege and power along other axes of their identity—many gay white men, for example. All too often, advocates of the normifying project of gay marriage fail to consider people of color, people who are imprisoned, people sidelined by an economic system that works against them.

For me, though, our queerness (read: openness to others and resistance to exclusionary identity politics) should win out over our loyalty to the label queer which will grow and change and wax and wane in relevance. We should be wary of axes of identity that threaten to become all-consuming, that demand prostration and conformity (enforced identities that are not in short supply in the world of LGBT politics). We must maintain our agency, preserve what limited capacity we do have for choice. We must choose to be queer by affirming ourselves and affirming others.

Several weeks ago, a preacher and social psychologist whom I follow on Twitter was on the look-out for people to follow who are hopeful “and not very sarcastic”. And an earlier tweet read: “One sarcastic comment can kill an authentic cross-cultural dialogue. But one sincere comment can resurrect it”. Based on the focus of her work and writing, I take “cross-cultural dialogue” primarily to mean conversation among Christians of color and white Christians in an American context.

Something felt off about opposing hope and sarcasm and in vilifying sarcasm as a killer of communication between diverse groups. What I began thinking about, beyond the truism of how we say something means as much as what we say, is how keen we are to have important conversations on our terms. We want the Other to present their case to us through our framework, not theirs. We want their difference refracted through our own lens.

Recently, a friend of mine who grew up in America in a family of West African origin and I were discussing comments he’d made about a group of feminists in the city where he lives, comments I found offensive and misguided. The thing was, he’d woven his criticisms of these feminists into an almost-poetic narrative touching on all kinds of themes, a narrative that was almost theatrical and seemed to blur the line with fiction. Because Facebook for me is a medium for factual exchanges and updates, I had a hard time figuring out how to react and tried to do so within my framework – logical, “fact-based” criticisms of the things he’d said. Rather than switch over and explain what exactly he was up to, which was my expectation, he kept on writing in the same fashion, and I’m glad he did. He invoked the kind of story-telling traditions important to him and I bristled. I wanted him to put that aside to deal with what I thought were legitimate criticisms that I had, but he refused. I felt like a robot meant to run on logic having my circuits overloaded, beeping “does not compute”.

I thought more about the hyperbole and the weaving together of fact and fiction that he employed to make a point that he wanted to make. What it came to be about was not whether I agree with the point, but on whose terms that point is meant to be discussed. I reflected on my own expectations for reasoned discourse. For me, there was little room for exaggeration, for fudging and blurring, or for fantastic imagery when it came to dealing with a ‘real’ issue like feminism. That sort of thing, to me, belonged in cinema and in books dealing with life abstractly, emotionally. And I thought more generally about other rhetorical techniques that rub me the wrong way. I’m immensely bothered by repetition, for example. If someone repeats the same word or phrase over verbatim, I’m annoyed by the excess. Not only does it feel gratuitous somehow, but it also makes me think a certain way about the person doing it, like they’re not operating on the accepted grounds for discourse, like they’re being theatrical.

Alarmingly, when I began to analyze the origins of my distaste for hyperbole, repetition, intense emotion, etc. when they were ‘out of place’ – that is to say, not safely contained within literature, music, film or another ‘properly’ artistic medium, but ‘invading’ serious discourse- I realized that many of these features are hallmarks of styles of black preaching and figure prominently in black culture. It probably sounds utterly naïve, but I sincerely hadn’t deeply considered that there was a latent racist element at play. It’s now something I try to remain on guard against, remembering that engaging in dialogue with someone is not just an exchange of facts within an emotionally measured, precise frame of logic, because that kind of exchange and the expectations I have for how it should play out are not universal, not ahistorical, not without a history and a context.

So returning to the tweets of my acquaintance, I have to wonder whether the call for hope without sarcasm is not a similar false step in communication between groups with different goals and different ways of moving toward those goals. I think of the importance of sarcasm and dark humor as means of coping and even of empowerment for many groups. Some of my favorite Irish and Irish-American authors come to mind as do elements within the queer community, etc.

What I’m hoping for is that, if we’re seriously seeking reconciliation and dialogue with the Other, whoever that may be to us, we need to be aware of the frameworks we take for granted and be less frustrated when we communicate with people who don’t. I think all too often we our unease with how things are communicated leads us to write off what is being communicated.

A person who, owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country

Queer refugees are people who flee their countries of nationality based on a well-founded fear of being persecuted for their non-normative sexuality and gender identity. I’m using ‘queer’ because it’s much less sterile than ‘non-normative’ and carries fewer of the kinds of burdens born by agglomerations of initials.

It took more than three decades following the adoption of the refugee convention for queer people fleeing persecution to begin to be granted refugee status. Because neither sexual orientation nor gender were included among the acceptable grounds for persecution, it was as members of a particular social group that queer refugees were shoehorned in. This particular social group was most frequently labeled, of course, “homosexuals”, a term rooted in and never untethered from a pathologizing medical discourse.

Unlike refugees persecuted on the basis of their religious beliefs and practices or on the basis of their political opinions, queer refugees have often faced a “discretion requirement”. That is to say, in many cases they’ve been told that, because it was possible for them to conceal their sexual orientation in order to prevent being persecuted, the burden was on them to do so and they were therefore denied the protections and rights associated with asylum.

Those most at risk for being told to go home and conceal their sexual orientation were refugees that, to Western adjudicators, seemed to be ‘naturally discreet’. What this meant was in the Western eye of the beholder. Adjudicators of asylum became adjudicators of correct expressions of sexual identity, deciding who was convincingly queer and who, same-sex attracted or not, could and should cover and thereby participate in their own persecution.

Understandably, these decision-making trends influence how asylum-seekers perform their sexual and gender identities. Queer refugees are often to be pressured to be other than who they are. Just as they are being judged on their worthiness to be granted asylum, the kind of sex they have, the kinds of places they socialize, the kind of music they listen to, and other supposed evidence is assessed for its homosexual verisimilitude. Their very lives may hinge on this performance, on playing just the right kind of homosexual.

Whereas living under persecution or the threat of persecution for years, queer refugees may have finessed an ability to pass as straight, suddenly they are meant to call up expected measures of campness or butchness and tell believable narratives about queer sex and queer relationships that map to the individual adjudicator’s conception of homosexuality. And, whether they’re granted or denied asylum, the expectations will yo-yo back. If they’re returned to their countries of origin, they’ll be expect to repress their queer sexuality. If they’re allowed to stay, all the expectations that face immigrants of all kinds will be waiting for them: demands that they will live out their queerness according to norms in the host country, however ill-fitting, but also demands along other axes of identity such as language, religion, and so forth.

I’ve been thinking lately about a couple of parallels between the queer refugee experience and the lives of queer people who live under the jurisdiction of US government and/or are impacted by American culture. When NBA player Jason Collins came out, for example, there were countless ‘soft’ detractors with comments to the effect of “It’s not that I have a problem with gay people, I just don’t see why they need to advertise it” or “it’s what he does on the court that matters, not what he does in the bedroom”. People who belong to this as-long-as-I-don’t-have-to-see-it camp are generously thought of as tolerant (one reason why that description is so problematic). In line with the reasoning behind the discretion requirement, they just don’t see why queer people can’t just be queer quietly, but outwardly be just like ‘everybody else’. Presumably, to this demographic, revealing that one is same-sex attracted is tantamount to talking about private sexual behavior. Like fish unaware of the water they’re swimming in, they fail to recognize the pervasiveness of heterosexual norms and the ways they are constantly reinforcing and performing their own idealized heterosexuality outside of their own bedrooms.

Queer people are bombarded by the minute with reminders that they’re abnormal. In blockbuster films, on major television networks, in print media, through advertising, in the questions asked by strangers and family members, in forms to be filled out, in behavioral questionnaires, in advice columns, in love songs, in mosques, synagogues, churches and temples, on bestseller lists, when prophylactics are marketed as contraceptives, when aunts inquire about love lives, in hospitals, at funerals, when talking about baby’s futures – in all of these contexts, queer people are reminded that heterosexuality is the baseline from which they are deviating. If queerness is taken into consideration, it’s often comedic or strange or uncomfortable or secondary (think supporting queer characters in a movie about straight love).

When a man and a woman walk down the street holding hands, we think about romance or love or commitment. When a woman and a man are in a park with children, we see a family. When a boy asks a girl to a high school prom, we think of the awkwardness of adolescence. When we see an elderly woman and an elderly man together on a porch swing, we think of lives well-lived and unbreakable bonds. When see a man and a woman together at an altar, we think of marriage. And on and on and on. But when we see two women at the altar, two men holding hands in the street, two men in the park with children, when a girl asks a girl to a middle school dance, when two old men are together on a porch swing, it is ingrained in many of us to do a double take, to find a political statement, to perceive a disorder or a mistake. But how these acts on the one hand be a part of life and on the other hand be shoving ‘what people do behind closed doors’ in the faces of the decent, sensible citizenry?

As in the case of refugees and other kinds of immigrants, there is a sense that one group is begrudgingly helping a disadvantaged group who must in recognition of the undeserved graciousness of their hosts be deferential and nonintrusive.

When refugees are granted asylum, the onerous expectation of assimilation looms before them. There’s no consideration for the fact that, like many immigrants, most refugees are not thrilled to have been torn from their homes, from the parts of their culture that they identify with, from communities whose norms and customs they were used to navigating. There are those who would demand that these refugees to abandon their native languages, aspects of their religious beliefs and practices, behaviors that just don’t quite fit with prevailing norms. They are, after all, in the host country because of the gracious goodwill of the good normal folks who were living there first.

This brings me to my thoughts on the recent advances in marriage equality. That rallying around a normifying institution like marriage has become the centerpiece in the fights for the acceptance of queer people is telling. We see corporate sponsorship of pride parades, religious support for same-sex marriage, and media portrayals of wholesome and harmless lesbian and gay couples (most often white). We have musicians like Macklemore singing about how queer love is the same as straight love (paired with wedding imagery) and we have celebrities galore expressing their support for the legal ability of queer people to marry. DOMA being struck down seemed a lot like a major victory, but for what?

We have narratives of ideal refugees and immigrants. From the earliest days of our international legal obligations to refugees we have figures like Einstein whom we hold up as a success of American benevolence to people fleeing persecution who then thrived and lived the American dream. We have various groups of industrious immigrants whom we distinguish from those who are here to steal jobs and live on our oh-so-generous welfare system. If you want to seek refugee in or immigrate to America, you must be a certain kind of person willing to jump through hoops. Whatever your position on immigration, this is not supposed to be the case for refugees who, unless they are guilty of serious crimes, have an inalienable right under international law to seek and be granted asylum from persecution. They need not be seeking the American dream or even desirous of learning English or becoming the next Einstein. In reality, of course, our asylum system is more selective than that.

And so it is this conditional support that queer people are receiving today. As long as you fit into this clean-cut, married, family-oriented, industrious prototype, we’ll overlook your negligible flaw, goes the narrative. We’re generously allowing you to be almost like us by granting you access to an institution that we consider the cornerstone of society. In return, you’ll just need to toe the line. Come join our churches, put your considerable wealth into the wedding-industrial complex, start feeling a little more squeamish and ambivalent about sex, help us reinforce it as a taboo we wink and nod at, etc. etc. etc.

Let me be clear, in drawing parallels, I do not mean to equate the unimaginable hardship of the refugee experience (especially the queer refugee experience) with what most queer people in the West have to contend with, but I do think it’s instructive to see the consistency in some of the attitudes that are at play both in asylum courts and in society at large.

We have two types of tolerance here. The first is intolerance masked as tolerance where a refugee is told by an asylum court that it’s fine that they’re a ‘homosexual’ but that they mustn’t act on it or manifest it in society in any way; and where a queer person in, say, the US, is told, “I don’t care if you’re gay, but I don’t want it shoved down my throat”. In these cases, the tolerability of queerness is only in the abstract. There’s no room for lived queerness. The second type of tolerance is condition tolerance where a refugee, proving that s/he conforms to certain stereotypes that convince an adjudicator s/he is worthy of protection based on membership in the particular social group of homosexuals, is welcomed to remain safe from persecution if s/he makes a variety of sacrifices; and where a queer American would be embraced, loved, and respected if they simply mimic idealized heterosexuality as best they can.

What we need in actuality is to embody fully the spirit of the Convention inasmuch as that entails the recognition of the right of queer people to be safe from harm and persecution, to be safe from living bare lives, to be safe from having to sacrifice themselves in the process of trying to save themselves. Queer people must be accepted without conditions, something that entails both straight and queer people building a society together that does not marginalize queer relationships and queer identities. Institutions, practices, and norms that reinforce straight hegemony must be question not only because of how they wound and restrict queer lives but because of how they wound and restrict all people. And just as importantly, it needs to be recognized that this isn’t just about queerness, but more broadly about how we conceive of difference and how we create and recreate, enforce, and reinforced norms. What are we policing and why? What are we upholding? What’s the value in it? Why are we trying to exclude whom we do?

At Subverting the Norm 2, I found myself cringing through most of Tony Jones’s “13 points of challenge and exhortation“. I’d been primed to see Tony as, at best, a ‘difficult personality’, so it was easy for me to seize onto the things he said that angered or unsettled me in order to reinforce the foregone conclusion. Chatting with Christena Cleveland afterward, I was glad to hear that she too was uncomfortable with several points that she thought would be ill-fitting in her home congregation and other Christian communities. At that same time, though, she found other of the points positive and constructive. I was looking forward to hearing which points were which. She said she was planning to write a response, and so I was really interested when she told me the other day that, though she didn’t get to all 13, she’d written a post that addressed one point in particular more broadly.

Christena’s post responded to Tony’s point about loyalty in which he claimed that “[w]e have a better version of the gospel in the West today”. And for whomever the we refers to, Tony calls for “stick[ing] together in spite of our doctrinal/theological/philosophical differences”. The trouble may’ve come from the lack of clarity on who “we” designated, because for Christena it appeared to mean white, well-educated males. I don’t disagree that that’s how it came across, but I also think Tony’s was talking about a group of white, often educated people whose tolerant, (aspirationally) progressive views and that his emphasis was on the fact that, compared with intolerant voices in American Christianity today, what “we” have to offer is better. I leave ‘we’ in quotes because it’s not clear to me given some of Tony’s other points whether I’m included or not.

So if we’re talking about whether the Gospel according to Jay Bakker is a better version than Pat Robertson‘s, I wholeheartedly agree and I am fairly confident Christena would too. I think her write-up, even though it imperfectly engages Tony’s actual point, addresses the dynamic and the context in which he is making the point. There was a lot of talk about diversity at the conference and a lot of earnest white people scratching their heads about why there weren’t more people of color, more women, and more queer people there. (That they weren’t talking much about class is a whole other problem.) What seems to be said is,”we (Tony’s ‘we’ of progressive Christians fits here) have constructed this wonderful welcoming place, we’ve invited the Other, why haven’t they joined us?” Perhaps we (and here I include myself) need to step back from “why haven’t they joined us” and look at the “we have constructed this” bit. These structures are the ones we have built.

I think the major project of white progressive Christianity right now is looking itself in the mirror and trying to make sense of its shortcomings; understanding its privilege and how that privilege has caused and continues to cause harm. Pride is taken in advocating for same-sex marriage and the inclusion of same-sex-attracted people into the Church; in continuing the uphill battle for women’s equality in society and in the Church; in combatting racism and religious intolerance – trying to be neighborly with Muslims, atheists, agnostics, and other Others. All of that, is, of course, worthwhile. But ironically, how these righteous goals are produced and the expectations held for others to reach them can reproduce some of the ugliness being grabbled with in the first place.

This is where I think Christena’s post is really important. What’s being addressed is not only these goals, but how we pursue these goals, why they are goals, for whom they are goals, and what other absent goals need to take their rightful place beside them. Take, for example, a perceived pervasive homophobia in congregations of color. Equality for queer people (or at least certain kinds of queer people) being a major plank of the white progressive Christian agenda can manifest itself in external demands and expectations that look structurally quite similar to other contexts in which white people in America have exercised power over people of color. Male-driven solutions within the Church for women’s empowerment and inclusion are problematic in a related way. Outside-in solutions do bespeak a certain sense of “cultural group idolatry”.

So when Tony talks about a better version of the gospel, I think he’s absolutely right. It is a better gospel for the specific “we” Tony’s talking about because it specifically responds to salient issues in that group. And I think the humility Christena calls for when two better versions of the gospel bump up against each other at the boundaries of a group and within a group is indispensable. Drawing on Christena’s discussion of the body of Christ, I would also say that just as one part of the body is attached and seamlessly connected to the next, the lines are blurry between and among congregations and identity groups. This means that talking about ‘progressive Christianity’ or ‘white Christians’ or ‘Christians of color’ is an imperfect way of talking. We’re all one and holistic health is best for each and every body part. At the same time, a cast fitted to the arm that help heal a broken elbow won’t do much for a foot.

I think the best way we can be loyal to the whole tribe is by going out and getting to know it. Leaving the structures built by those of us who are the kind of people who’ve perhaps had more than our fair share of structure-building and entering into those of others if only to be able to look at our own better and more critically. We might then be able to return to them and tweak them (or tear them down where necessary) rather than twiddling our thumbs sheltering inside them wondering where everyone else is. We can approach our own goals with fresh eyes and understand what pursuing them and what how we pursue them means for others. In this perpetually unfinished process, I think we’ll find better and better gospels.

Nodding in eager agreement during one of initial planning sessions, we listen attentively to Peter Rollins tell us about the importance of feeling. Pete is the primus inter pares of the New York-area iteration of Ikon, a collective “on the outer edges of religious life” that “offer[s] anarchic experiments in transformance art […] [c]hallenging the distinction between theist and atheist, faith and no faith”. For several minutes, he extols the virtues of feeling, the necessity of feeling. It all sounds very good. And then he looks at us funny and asks, “are yous guys getting what I mean when I say feeling?”

We weren’t. We mistook a lesson on failing for one on feeling because of his Belfast brogue. The mistake was supremely apt. If my fellow IkonNYC organizers and planners were anything like me, we went into the project of a ‘one year church’ or a new incarnation of Ikon with the understanding that it would be an experience geared toward our own transformation. We were going to delve into the depths of doubt and faith and experience surefire pretested spiritual practices whose success in Belfast we’d heard so much about. I had come to feel in as far as feeling refers to passive experience. I was a little thrown, then, when I learned that we were all taking an active role in planning events and carrying out practices aimed at getting others to find a liminal space in which to engage with their Christian faith and their Christian doubts. What could I, still trying to claim that space for myself, offer to others?

Despite my misgivings, I was on board. As often as my schedule has allowed, I’ve attended the weekly meetings where we plan our monthly transformance art events and participated in one way or another in most of them. I also became one of the coordinators of the Evangelism Project which consists of monthly visits to churches, synagogues, mosques, temples whose practitioners’ beliefs and practices help us see our own differently.

This process was one of moving from feeling to failing. After a half-year of excitement and build-up, I missed the inaugural transformance art event as well as the next one responding to the vagaries of the job market and trying to make sound decisions about my next steps. And, over the course of the following six months, IkonNYC failed and succeed in various ways and I with it. Pete already having a following was a boon to our first several events. A combination of factors—figuring out exactly what transformance art meant to a planning group with dozens of voices and scores of ideas, perhaps pricing, a lack of marketing prowess, etc.—quickly shrank the number of attendees. At the same time, some of us found our voices and the increased intimacy of a group consisting of those executing the event and a cluster of reliable friends was important for that. So far we’ve learned practical lessons and spiritual ones, we’ve learned about each other. We’ve built strong friendships that’ve enhanced our lives.

When several members of IkonNYC traveled to the second Subverting the Norm conference, a subset of us participated in a panel discussion moderated by our friend Krista Dalton. I was overwhelmed by the positive responses and many questions we received about how to replicate what we were up to. Was our audience really interested in our modest and failure-ridden attempts?

On the heels of the conference, one of the attendees, Stephen Keating, used his inaugural post at An und für sich to criticize “transformance art collectives” of which IkonNYC is not only one, but perhaps the most susceptible to the critiques he levels. And while initially I felt very defensive as did a lot of people in and connected to Ikon, IkonNYC, and VOID, it did make me think about how I was conceiving of failure, which is after all one of the coordinates for Ikon. Did the concern with marketing and numbers some of us had or the emphasis on branding and replicability represent a failure more than the lack of marketing and the low numbers themselves? How did the questions about diversity and political engagement and awareness of power structures and prevailing ideologies apply to us?

These are questions we’d asked of ourselves and one another, these are questions we continue to ask. In fact, you can join IkonNYC tomorrow (Sunday, 19 May) at Prospect Park where we’ll be discussing issues like these in lieu of our monthly transformance art event. Whatever answers and solutions come up, no doubt they’ll be imperfect, but what’s important is that we keep failing. We must move from feeling, a process of recognition that is necessary, to failing which entails reacting constructively to our experiences with the knowledge and expectation that we’ll get it wrong, at least in part. Without risking getting it wrong though, we will get it categorically wrong. Failing well means acting thoughtfully and with self-awareness, resisting the paralysis that comes with fearing failure.

Before I embarked on a month-long family history odyssey in Ireland last year, I was corresponding with a distant cousin who was born and raised there and then moved as an adult to Australia. At one point, he asked me, “do you feel Irish?” As an American who’s lived in Europe, I know better than to lay claim to other nationalities. The French have just the eye roll for such pretensions. And so I stifled my Irish pride and gave him a wordy, self-conscious answer that ended with “How Irish that makes me, I guess, is up to ‘real’ Irish people”.

His response:

Regarding your Irishness – I say go for it and fuck the begrudgers! If you feel Irish then you are Irish. If you don’t, you [aren’t]. I don’t think it is up to anyone to define that other than yourself. I understand you are sensitive to the stereotypical ‘Yank proclaiming [they’re] Irish’, which might appear fake, but you seem to have as good a case as anyone to be an Irishman.

So there I had it, license from a ‘real’ Irishman (or is he an Australian now, or an Irish-Australian) to consider myself Irish. Even so, I remained skeptical about the legitimacy of my taking up the mantle. What does it mean to be Irish anyway?

Three of my grandparents have forebears from the island of Ireland. Of these, my maternal grandmother Doreen’s Irish ancestors, hailing from Counties Cork, Louth, and Down were the last to immigrate to North America, all after the Great Famine. My grandma Doreen’s great-grandfather, Thomas O’Brien, was born and raised in Carrigroe, a townland between the West Cork towns of Clonakilty and Rosscarbery. He’s the wee one in middle of the photo below flanked by his first cousin and his son, both Catholic priests.

Thomas, as the sixth child out of twelve, likely emigrated primarily for economic reasons. His eldest brother, Michael, stood to inherit the family farm. Daniel, the second son, moved to Clonakilty and married there. James, the next in line, married and settled at Sam’s Cross, a few kilometers to the north. John became a priest whose appointments were all in West Cork. Kate, the eldest daughter, married and moved near Blarney. Thomas at 26 or 27, left for New York where he remained for a couple of years before ultimately settling in Marshall County, Illinois, where all of my own grandparents lived at one time or another. The younger siblings variously ended up in Australia, the States, Bandon Convent, etc.

Thomas’s family had long supported the Irish drive for independence. In 1841, his uncle, John Murray, donated money to the effort to repeal the 1800 Act of Union that bound Great Britain and Ireland legislatively. Thomas’s brother, Fr. John, was remembered for hearing the confessions of Fenians at Kilmeen when they were turned away by the parish priest in Clonakilty. He is also mentioned in Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa‘s memoirs. Thomas himself was well-regarded enough in independence-minded circles to have his obituary appear in John Devoy‘s Gaelic American. A veritable encomium, it lauded my great-great-great-grandfather for having “never forgot[ten] the land of his birth” and for being “always ready with purse and voice to aid any movement to benefit Ireland”. He was called “[o]ne of that fine old type of the Irish pioneer who did so much for the progress and civilization of his adopted country and the spread therein of the Catholic faith”. This good nationalist Irish Catholic not only didn’t forget the land of his birth, but also returned there twice, the second time in the early 1900s when he was in his 70s. Even though he spent the majority of his life in the US and was naturalized in 1868, it would be hard to argue against his Irishness, his identity being bound up with Ireland however you might define it.

One of Thomas’s nieces, Marianne, grew up on the farm at Sam’s Cross where her father James O’Brien and Johanna, née McCarthy, settled after marriage. (Johanna, incidentally, is credited with inventing the original recipe for Clonakilty Blackpudding. I accrue more Irish points there by association, no doubt.) The Atlantic wasn’t too formidable a barrier to the Sam’s Cross O’Briens keeping in touch with our lot in Camp Grove, Illinois: by the time Marianne had a family of her own, she was still close enough with her uncle Thomas that when her son, Pat, emigrated as a teenager in 1900, he lived with Thomas and his wife Ellen and those of their children that remained at home. Pat eventually moved to the city and became a police captain in South Chicago, returning downstate now and again on holidays to regale cousins with tales of cops and mobsters.

Several years after Pat emigrated, his younger brother Michael went to live with their sister Hannie in London. It was as an expatriate that Michael joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), the clandestine organization whose military council organized the East Rising in 1916. Gaining prominence during the Rising, Michael would go on to become a towering figure in 20th century Irish history. His roles included president of the IRB, Sinn Féin politician, Finance Minister of the newly-declared Irish Republic, the Director of Intelligence of the IRA, delegate to the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations, Chairman of the Provisional Government, and Commander-in-Chief of the National Army. Assassinated by anti-Treaty IRA forces during the civil war that followed independence, he died a hero in the eyes of some, a traitor in the eyes of others. With no children of his own, his siblings, and then his nephews and nieces, and now his great-nephews and great-nieces are the keepers of his legacy. This generation knows him only through the stories of their parents and grandparents and through inherited documents and photos. And at the same time, many of them have directly participated in the ongoing political project of independent Ireland that he furthered. They have held political office (primarily in the Fine Gael party), practice law, teach, work in humanitarian organizations, and so on.

Memorial card for Daniel Patrick O’Brien formerly in the possession of his cousin’s daughter, Hannie Collins.

So I think I’ve sufficiently demonstrated that my ancestors and my relatives are Irish and in fact have been instrumental in shaping what Ireland is today. But does that make me Irish? What about the generations between me and good Irish Thomas? His son, my grandma’s grandfather, Daniel Patrick O’Brien, for example, never set foot on Irish soil, being born and raised in Illinois and dying at 42.

His brother Mike, on the other hand, made trips back to Ireland and so though he too was born and raised in Illinois, he got to know the country his parents grew up in and the relatives they left behind. A letter from their first cousin Ellen “Nell” O’Brien-Twohig in Dublin to her niece in America mention a visit Mike made to Limerick to ‘find particulars’ on the history of the family. In the letter, Nell reproduces a retelling of a legend about how the O’Briens (traditionally a family name associated with County Clare) ended up in West Cork that she attributes to Mike.

Daniel Patrick and Michael Paul O’Brien, brothers. 1901.

Here’s the legend as it appeared:

In the Penal Days when Catholics were deprived of property if they did not conform to the new Religion, the heir of Lord [Inchiquin] (O’Brien of Clare) saw a young boy of 18 hanged on a tree near the entrange gate as he passed by on horseback one day. He knew the boy, cut down the body, and rode on indignantly after a company of Yeomanry which had passed on. On overtaking them, he asked the leader why this outrage had been committed, and he said “what did the death of a Papist mean to him” upon which young O’Brien lifted his gun, and shot the other dead. Realizing too late what he had done, he rode madly on and some time during the night, got back to his Castle. Everywhere, the hue and cry had been raised. His mother begged him to fly to the Coast and try to get a passage in one of the ships which then did much trade round the different counties.

Luckily, one was just going to sail and he took passage, going by Kerry, round by Cork, where at a certain place, he got off and wandered inland for some miles.

He asked and received hospitality at a respectable house, the story goes on to tell that he remained on, joining in the odd duties inside and outside the house as the Father of the family had only just died. A few years passed peacefully and he thought all may be forgotten if he returned home so he set out on a return journey. When he at length reached it, his Mother and Sweetheart would not receive him. They had given up the Catholic Religion, the girl was engaged to the next brother who had been made the heir in the belief that the elder had disappeared forever, so he went back to Cork and married the young girl in the house where he had been received so kindly and who really had loved him from the start.

This family lore really delves into what it means to be Irish not only in general, but to those past generations of my family on both sides of the Atlantic. This is an Irishness uncovered by an Irish-American and retold by his cousin, the godmother of Michael Collins. So here, being Irish means Catholicism, bravery, loyalty, perhaps rashness. (Unless you’re a woman, then it means treachery or long-suffering patience, depending upon which woman you are in the story.) And even County Cork, if we’re to follow the metaphor, is the truest bastion of Irishness, the place where the O’Brien fleeing British Protestant treachery found kindess and love.

Irish Catholicism has remained important in my family. Thomas and Ellen O’Brien gave money toward the construction of the Catholic church that stands not too far from their farmstead. Saint Patrick’s in Camp Grove still has two stained glass windows with the family name on them, though politics within the Catholic Diocese of Peoria seem to be precipitating the demolition of the century-old church. It was in this parish that Thomas and Ellen’s funerals were held, Pat Collins coming down to be a pallbearer. It was there that their son, Rev. Thomas B. O’Brien performed his first Solemn Mass. My great-great-grandparents, Dan O’Brien and Sadie Colgan were married there, as were my great-grandparents, and my grandparents. Countless family baptisms, first communions, confirmations, marriages, and funerals happened there. The church’s hall, called O’Brien Hall for a time, was the social hub for the Irish in the area. When my great-grandmother, Evelyn, married my great-grandfather, a German-American man from an Apostolic Christian background, he converted to Catholicism wholeheartedly. His baptism and their marriage appear in the church records. Similarly my Lutheran father, though he did not convert, agreed to marry my mother in the Catholic church. I was baptized Catholic and the plan was to raise me that way, maintaining this deeply-held faith and artifact of our Irishness.

After my parents’ divorce, however, my mom met a man who, coincidentally, like a sizable number of people in the North of Ireland, was a Presbyterian with Scottish roots. As their relationship developed and led to marriage, my mom became a Protestant and they wed in a Presbyterian church that we attended for several years thereafter. So, while the rest of my mother’s family remained Catholic and we attended mass on the occasions of the first communions and confirmations of our cousins, I was taught in the Protestant churches we attended that Catholicism was misguided at best.

And yet, there was some powerful remnant of the Irish Catholicism that was passed down to me. As I learned about Irish history, I knew who ‘my people’ were, that the Catholics who were, after all, my ancestors and are my relatives, were the ‘good guys’. Despite my then-dogmatic opinions that were highly critical of the theology, practice, and traditions of the Catholic church, I still felt a strong affinity for Catholicism, at least as a cultural signifier. During my trip to Ireland last year, I traveled to the North and met my Colgan relatives in County Down, a place where sectarianism is a much fresher wound than far down in the Republic. I heard stories of what my Catholic relatives there endured and was surprised at the depth of my own anger at the presence of Orange Halls and my contempt for the Union Jacks strung up everywhere for the Queen of England’s Diamond Jubilee.

A lot of the cognitive dissonance between the religious identity I was raised with and my affinity for Catholicism came from an Evangelical understanding of religion that centered on right belief. I remember finding it absurd when I met someone who claimed to be “half-Catholic” because to me a religious identifier hinged solely on beliefs. In fact, what underlay her claim is the truth that religious practice is intimately bound up in other facets of culture. In college, while I clung to my Evangelical beliefs and, indeed, identity (because after all, American Evangelicalism is just as enmeshed in the particular as any other iteration of religion), I made room for Catholicism. In fact, I stopped being part of Campus Crusade and began attending RCIA and hanging out at the Newman Center. I went on a retreat and was deeply moved by it. Though ultimately, I did not convert or reconvert or return or whatever verb the reader might choose to describe what would’ve happened if I’d chosen to get confirmed, I do feel strongly that engaging with a tradition that I view as part of my heritage was a good and meaningful thing to do.

A funny thing happened, though, on my way to romanticizing Catholicism and identifying with Irish Catholic culture. As I mentioned, three of my grandparents have Irish ancestry that I know about. I’ve chronicled the history of my mother’s mother’s Irishness and though I know much less about the details, I know that my mother’s father is the great-grandson of an Irish Catholic woman who married a German Catholic. On my paternal grandfather’s side, however, is a whole other kind of Irishness: Methodists, likely from the North of Ireland. While a great-great-great-grandfather on my mom’s side was a proud Fenian and Michael Collins’s great-uncle, a great-great-great-grandmother on my dad’s side was born in a tiny Ontario town named for the site of the final battle in a campaign in which Protestant British forces quelled a Catholic uprising. In Culloden, which is now barely on the map, there was a local chapter of the Orange Order, but no Catholic church.

So how to reconcile with that also being my heritage in some way? How does that narrative fit into my Irishness? In reality, like so many Americans, but also like so many people around the world, I am the collision of all kinds of identities, some conflicting. And yet, to answer my distant cousin’s question, “do I feel Irish”, the answer is emphatically, yes. And I feel an attachment to Catholicism and to Evangelicalism and to being American and so on.

What’s important to recognize about these kinds of identities is that even though we may not see fit to espouse them outright, we are free to acknowledge the impact they’ve had on who we are. I am not an Irish citizen, I do not live or participate in civic life in Ireland, but I exist because of the political and economic conditions in Ireland that led my great-great-great-grandfather to emigrate. I am not an active member of the Catholic Church, but I would not be who I am without Catholicism.

And to be sure, my identity is what you make of it. I would be ‘Irish’ whether I acknowledged it or not, just as I would have the same genes whether or not I knew about the ancestors I inherited them from. Insofar as we carry on the cultures, quirks, values and even as we developed others in response to those presented to us by our families, our ancestry is always with us. Because knowing the genealogy of the stories I’ve inherited and understanding them in context is important to me as knowing the bare bones facts of names and dates, I’ve been able to bring my family tree to life by connections with some of my distant cousins in Ireland. I have spent time with them there, been welcomed into their homes, and even formed ongoing friendships. Their lives and what they’re making of Ireland today and my life and how I participate in society are all tethered to thousands of years of Irish history.